In which two cats walk into a bar and I admire Noah

Neal’s Belch no 157 for 3rd Sept, 2004

Two cats walk into a bar. One of them is under the illusion that he’s an ox, so he orders a pint of Oxbow, whatever that is.

As for the other cat, I’m surprised he even went into the bar at all in the first place. He’s one of those cats who has not developed any human-like characteristics, and normally just does ordinary cat things like climbing onto roofs and playing with dead mice. Still, it’s nice to have a surprise every now and then isn’t it.

As it happens, it turns out that the cat was short sighted, and thought it was a “car”, not a “bar”. Being an ordinary no frills cat, not one of those intelligent cats you see in cartoons who walk on two legs and watch the news, he does’t realise that cars generally don’t have a big sign outside them saying “car”

Anyway, he goes ahead up to the bar and after a few minutes he sees his mistake. So he decides to adapt to the situation and have a night out in a bar, instead of his planned evening of napping on a car seat.

Not being used to having a choice of beverage (usually he either gets given a bowl of milk or drinks some water from a sewer outlet), he takes a long, long time to decide what drink he wants.

And he enjoys every minute of it. He’s in cat heaven. Eventually he makes up his mind and orders a pint of semi-skimmed. whereupon the bartender advises him that it’s traditional to order a beer or a whiskey or something like that.

The cat points out that he’s not remotely interested in traditions, and that he is, after all, a mere cat, equipped not with a sophisticated set of tastes and a spoilt pallet, but instead just a few insticts inherited from the jungle and polluted by domestication.

The bartender listens politely and points out that the cat has a very good vocabulary for a “mere” cat. The cat politely thanks him, before bidding him good day and going to the dairy.

All of which brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about today. In my formative years, I lived in a rainforest here in Ireland, and never wanted for monkeys or monkey nuts. Monkey bolts were a problem, as it was illegal to remove trees from the rainforest and so we were not able to clear enough space for a steel mine, but we survived, and we’ve all grown up to be reasonably well adjusted individuals, if I say so myself.

Nowadays, as any environmentalist will tell you, the rainforests are disappearing at a tremendous rate. They’re still there of course, but it’s impossible to see them when your glasses have become steamed up from centuries and centuries of rain.

What we need to do is somehow cause a change to the climate so that this rain stops, and then everything will be okay. My suggestion would be that we all stand up for one minute, at exactly the same time, and lift up our right foot, the one with the scabs all over it, so that the fumes given off cause some sort of atmospheric event That will probably sort it out.

If it doesn’t, we’re going to have to get the hell off this planet.

That’s why I’m not wasting any time. I wasn’t going to tell you this but I have, in my back shed, a half finished ark which I intend to use when the bran cereal hits the ventilator. Hopefully it will be finished by then, but that doesn’t really matter because it’s not going to sink is it? I’ll be sailing through outer space, not a vast wet ocean full of water.

It’s much easier to swim in a vacuum than in water. I’ve seen it done on movies. Remember that man in “2001: A Space Odyssey”? The one who floated off into space, never to be seen again, and presumably dead within hours when his oxygen supply runs out? That’s what I plan to do.

I’ve always admired Noah. He knew what he was doing. He saved all the female animals, then made sure each of them had a male of the same species to keep them occupied so that they wouldn’t distract him while he was trying to steer the ark round the tops of the hills.

He also had very good hair. Long and white and flowing, with a matching beard, just like the fellow in the Harry Potter movies. Except of course without the glasses and much older.

It has, throughout my life, been a mystery to me why our short sighted pets are never given glasses when they are diagnosed as being short sighted, or when they are found to be long sighted and find it difficult to read small print. I suspect it’s a conspiracy to prevent other species from evolving and taking over from us humans as the dominant beings. That’s all very well but they forgot about the computers.

We’ve been warned over and over again by Arnold Schwarzenegger that computers are going to take over the world, but we continue to help them by feeding them information through our keyboards. I’m doing it right now, I admit. By typing these paragraphs I am telling my computer how much I know or don’t know or think I know about it’s plan to take over the world, arming it with information. Yet I continue to type. I really am quite a dinghbat.

Maybe I should try typing false information to confuse it. The moon is made out of a special low-carb cheese that is safe to eat in large quantities and definitely won’t jam your circuits, unless you have jam with it too. The current time is quarter to four in the morning. Judge Judy is our leader.

See what you can make of THAT, you electronic power hungry bamtards.